The latest salvo in the on-going debate over the future of reading comes from the New York Times' Motoko Rich.

There's this great photo accompanying the story in which the Sims family (great name!) of Old Greenwich, Connecticut, is gathered in their living room. Mom is clutching a newspaper, Dad a book, and their two teenage kids are staring at laptops. Son Zachary, it turns out, consumes something like 200 RSS feeds a day, an amount of content that Mom finds "mind boggling," but not particularly distressing. But more concerning to the parents is the great deal of time daughter Emma's spends online playing games and connecting up with friends.

Thing is, both kids appear to be doing the very same thing. But they're clearly engaged in different pursuits. And that's basically the Steven Johnson argument -- that we're using a bunk definition of "reading" if we're limiting it to ink-and-paper books and newspapers, and not taking into account all the text we take in online. There was this great story from the British Library's main reading room a few months back where old-timers complained that the new batch of researchers just didn't look like they're working, because they're click-click-clicking away at computers instead of being hunched over tomes. That definition of "working" is fairly dated. Our definition of reading is also pretty archaic.

Now me, I like books, like 'em a lot. Ever since I was a wee one, I've loved putting the effort into seeing through one person's vision for a few hundred pages of commitment. I do struggle a bit to find time for them now. Time spent consuming all the wonderful stuff online -- whether it's Boing Boing or nytimes.com -- is time not spent reading full books. Whether or not that's a loss for the universe is the big question, but I do personally find myself wishing I spent more time on actual books.

Of course, the boring but probably pretty spot-on answer to this is, ho-hum, balance. Maybe we all are gorging a bit on digital content right now, what with it being all free and delicious! So maybe something useful the National Endowment for the Arts -- a big participant in these reading debates -- could do is to mock up a reading pyramid like the one we have for food. Give us a useful guide to balancing our textual consumption.

So, Matt Yglesias has decided to leave The Atlantic to take up a post with the content-creating wing of the Center for American Progress. Super interesting stuff. Matt was the very first political blogger I ever read -- whiling away those long recess hours in the Rayburn H.O.B., circa 2002 or so. He introduced me to the possibility that blogging could be a factor in the swirl of D.C. political life. Memorieeees... Anyway, it seems Matt's hungry to be more of an activist and an advocate than a journalist, but what's particularly intriguing to me is this line in his announcement post: "From a reader's point of view, this probably won't make a huge difference." As a writer/blogger with a big following, having the ability to pack up and move to a new URL is probably tremendously thrilling in a "f___ you money" sort of way. But there is a trade-off. First of all, you're probably not in as great a position to tap into institutional resources that way. And secondly, there's not as much tying you to your colleagues -- which is, in fact, one of the very reasons Matt cited for leaving The Atlantic for CAP.

Waaaaaay back on June 26, I wrote a post on what I called "hook journalism," about the future of multi-thousand word investigative writing in the digital age. The article I was riffing off of was a rather extraordinary piece in Fast Company by Richard Behar on China's dominance in Africa. Behar had spent a month reporting the piece in four sub-Saharan countries. I issued a plaintive wail about the future prospects of such spectactular works of journalism. To my great pleasure, that post attracted two very smart responses. I'd meant to respond to them both in the comments at the time, but somehow I lost track of them. So I'd like to pull them out now and offer some thoughts.

The first was from David Colarusso, on funding journalism that requires travel:

I remembered how valuable I found it when a good contingent of NPR's news staff was in China during the earthquake, serendipitous as it may have been. Being on location is invaluable. Then I wondered why a local couldn't have done the work. Of course, the answer is one of perspective, often an outside view is what's needed to bring clarity. However, the web's distributed intelligence may one day allow for such a piece to come about via careful coordination at a distance and for a reasonable cost.

Just after I finished up a master's program at B.U. in anthropology, I went down to Yale to study Kiswahili. And my professor there, a sassy Kenyan linguist, liked to give me a hard time. What could you possibly know about Kenya, he'd say, that I don't? My answer? Some, at least. First of all, I had usefully studied my research topic (namely, slavery on the Swahili Coast of East Africa) from a multicultural, academic perspective. He hadn't. Secondly, as a blank slate, I could let the story tell itself rather than imposing my own experiences. I still believe both to be true. Insert "journalist" for "anthropologist" and you have my thinking on why in some contexts non-local journos might still be the way to go.

The second was this from Carlo Scannella about the future of really, really long stories:

[W]hile I'm convinced there's no market for 38-screen stories on the web (I don't know about you, but if it's more than a couple pages long, I print it. Sorry, trees...), a technology like the Kindle points us to a future where we have the mobility of the wireless web with the physicality of paper-based books.

I like Carlo's point a lot. But the question I have here is about timing. Are we indulging in wishful thinking to believe the day will soon come when a critical mass of us are toting around dedicated book readers? Long-form journalism is collapsing quickly. Just about everyday there's a new story on the sorry state of the newspaper business. And our paperless future has been off in the distance for some time now. The worry is that if we our existing journalism models crumble, we're going to find it quite a challenge to build something up in their place. While a Kindle in every pocket is an appealing goal, right now they're $359 and still very much a niche product.

Both great contributions, and it thrills me to no end that David and Carlo came here to make them. (Photo thx nikkorsnapper. Photo is of dancers outside the National Theatre in Accra, Ghana, which was designed, financed, and built by China.)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Twitter is just a silly web app. And man, is it down an awful lot! But, I tell ya, it's going to have to try harder than that to drive me away. I just found out from my network that the line at the Apple store on 5th Ave is 200 people deep and the wait at the Soho store five hours long The first tweet was a result to a question I posed; the second was just the right bit of info bubbling up at the right time. Both are bits of news that potentially saves me hours of my life -- if I wasn't such a fool that I'm probably going to go try anyway.

Yeah, I'm going. I'll probably Twitter my progress, if it's not doing its Fail Whale thing... (Photo thx workinpana)

UPDATE: The second tweet concerned the wait at the Apple store in the meatpacking district, not Soho. My bad.

Fast Company is running a truly great several-thousand-word epic article by Richard Behar called simply "China in Africa." The gist is that China is going about establishing an enormous footprint on the African continent to fuel its more ever more modern lifestyle while the rest of the world ignores Africa altogether. Here's a key paragraph:

Influence of that magnitude threatens to wipe out a decade's worth of efforts by global institutions to push African governments to improve human rights and government transparency. As Sahr Johnny, the Sierra Leonean ambassador in Beijing, once said about China's projects in Africa: "They just come and do it. We don't hold meetings about environmental-impact assessment, human rights, bad governance and good governance. I'm not saying that's right. I'm just saying Chinese investment is succeeding because they don't set high benchmarks."

It's eye-opening, remarkably entertaining, and -- brace yourself -- really long. In fact, it's the longest article Fast Company has ever published. But it is worth the investment of your time. I promise. ... I can't do justice to Behar's special report, masterfully edited by executive editor Will Bourne, in this small space, but I hope you'll settle in and read this saga. It's the kind of article that people like me go into this business to help create.

The editorial team at Fast Company clearly have their chest puffed out over this work, as they should. The hired a talented reporter, assigned to the story a strong editor, and produced something that adds to the world's understanding of itself.

And that excellence leads me to two points. The first is that IMHO and from my narrow perspective "China in Africa" is immensely valuable journalism. There's no breaking news here, but there is reporting and perspective that equips me better understand this crazy madcap world. I remember very clearly a time when Jane and I were backpacking through Ghana in the summer of 2001 and found ourselves sitting in the gorgeous National Theater in the capital city of Accra that was designed, financed, and built by the Chinese and thinking, "hmm, now just what the heck is going on here." Seven years on, I understand that experience better because of the work of Behar and his editors.

But the second point is more on my mind these days as I make a go of it as a writer. Is "China in Africa" is the last gasp of a dying era? Let's be frank -- an article of this length and topic makes no sense on the web. I'm genuinely curious of whether if all journalism moves online, which frankly looks entirely likely, is there any hope for keeping many-thousand-word pieces like this viable?

First off, it's ridiculously, absurdly long. I counted 38 different browser screens of text to click through. If you want to check out the infographics than ran side-by-side the article in print, that's 7 more screens. It's clearly a print piece ported, however awkwardly, to the publication's website.

It is indeed a awkward fit. I've mentioned here before that I've been reading some of Jakob Nielsen's stuff (about 10 years after every other geek, I know) and what's perfectly clear is that we read differently online. Jakob has some eye tracking research that shows how people "read" websites. For one thing, we scan the top section and then quickly whip down the left side of the screen looking for whatever might jump out. It's only natural that what works best on line is what we might as well call hook journalism -- grab your reader or your out o' luck. Of course, all journalistic writing has always need a hook. But in the past, hasn't the hook been more of the plating and less of the entree?

And then there's the cost factor. Something like "China in Africa" is incredibly resource sucking. I was just reading earlier this week the latest news about how newspaper ad revenue is on track to have its worst year ever and that some publications are even considering dropping a day or two of their print editions. Without some sort of sustainable revenue model, how exactly do you support a reporter out in the field in four different sub-Saharan countries? It's not cheap to pay for a reporter to spend more than a month jumping from Congo to Equatorial Guinea to Mozambique to Zambia. Who is going to pay for that for a reporter to simply come back with a hell of a story?

So, let me cut to the chase -- do we have a plan for making stories like "China in Africa" possible in the future? Is there even a hint of a model for journalism like that on the horizon? I'm hopeful, because that's my nature, but I haven't seen much to justify that hope. Of course, there are some interesting new journalism projects bubbling up, in particular Pro Publica and The Huffington Post's OffTheBus. The thing is, it looks like to me a lot like as the world gets increasingly complex, we're focused on building journalistic tools that are narrowly tailored to finding bad guys. For example, this is Pro Publica's self description:

Our work will focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with "moral force." We will do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

And OffTheBus is solely geared towards the '08 presidential election, and its most notably accomplishment thus far is Mayhill Fowler, who without making a judgment either way, has made her name in gotcha journalism. We're scandal obsessed, on the hunt for the flip flop, and I'd argue that while that might be a good plan for one kind of a journalism it can't be a replacement for the whole endeavor.

So, I'll ask it again: should be resign ourselves to the idea that "China in Africa" is the last gasp of a dying era? I'd really like to know the answer to that question. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I haven't found any good answers yet. I really do want to learn here, so if you have thoughts please share them.